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On their blog today, Mobile Commons explains how AARP used text-to-voice to mobilize senior citizens around health care reform.
It’s not news that mobile (and particularly phone and sms) are the tech tools that connect with the widest audience, but I’m continually impressed by the way that Mobile Commons has built a platform that makes it super-easy to mix modes (text/phone/photo) using custom built workflows. There’s so much opportunity for civic hacking here it makes my head hurt.
Here at TOPP Labs, we’re thinking about how projects like Community Almanac or FixCity could benefit from richer mobile experiences, and we’re planning to work more mobile into nearly all of our future civic engagement projects. The Mobile Commons feature of using a text message to prompt a voice reply is particularly interesting to me, and could make for some really interesting public-space survey type apps.
So, what are the best examples you’ve seen of using mobile to leverage civic engagement? What tools are you using?
4 Comments
Filed under Community Involvement, Online Participation, Open Government Tags: mobile commons —
2:00 pm on November 9, 2009
Interesting, all I’ve been thinking about lately is Voice-to-text. You should definitely see http://www.voiceingov.org/blog/?p=1246
Voice is actually a lot cheaper than txt, so all these new VOIP and auto-transcribing services that operate with web API’s are going to have a really significant impact (Tropo, Cloudvox, CallFire, TringMe, Twilio, Ribbit, Google Voice, etc). One of the things I realized at the Open311 DevCamp is that SMS is prohibitively expensive for a lot of applications and hence the trend toward Twitter as a medium when possible. But the reality is that voice provides the widest coverage, it reaches all demographics, and has the most universal interface.
Ribbit just opened-up their service and there are already some cool simple demos: http://twitter.com/philipashlock/status/5457291803
Right – the cost of SMS keeps coming up as a blocker for civic apps, especially run by small budget orgs. See this post http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/civil-society-text-text about the State Department’s new text-based program in Pakistan, Humari Awaz. The state department is putting up the dough for the first 24 million texts sent, but the system already processed 500,000 in the first week, so that won’t last long.
This may be a naive idea, but it seems that telcos could conceivably offer texts to/from nonprofit orgs at a discount rate, since I don’t believe there’s a capacity issue in the network.
I don’t think there’s the same kind of prohibitive cost factor when using a personal phone or account with unlimited SMS as a server. I’m sure there are some limitations with regard to maximum volume or the subscriber policy, but there are clearly important opportunities with adhoc DIY approaches like SlingshotSMS (http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/aug/14/slingshotsms-alpha-code-released-lightweight-sms-gateway-stick) and FrontlineSMS (http://www.frontlinesms.com). Also, the fact that SMS costs phone carriers virtually nothing is still an ongoing debate: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/business/28digi.html
[...] of how expensive SMS is for services to support (and there’s some discussion of this on the TOPP Labs blog today). The far more universal and far cheaper medium is voice (phone calls) and obviously that is how [...]